Reading the Body
ef = "/cgi-bin/vote/votec.cgi?/culture/990515/reading.html"> "In the two hundred years since tattooing has been (re-) introduced to the West, the phenomenon has gone through cycles of acceptance and rejection as an art form" (Campbell, DAI).
A few weeks ago I was sitting in on a professor's 'Disability Lit.' class. She utterred the phrase; "Body as text." The phrase, in this setting, referred directly to a disabled person and how a person's body could literally be read. Even though that particular phrase was a direct reference to a disabled body I started to think of other instances in which the body could be seen as text. I thought of tattooing as body text, and the possibility of seeing the tattooed as walking literature. With the rising popularity of tattooing, along with other forms of body art, the tattooed body has become a platform on which messages can be read. Body art, I argue (and hope), is slowly becoming a post-modern literature genre and basis for literary study. What, exactly, is literature? That is an age-old question asked in every literature class I have ever taken. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what constitutes literature, and those ideas are constantly changing. So someone is bound to buy the argument of tattooing as a new form of literature. I often wonder why Hemingway is so often considered great literature and Kerouac is so readily cast aside by most literature professors. Perhaps this differentiation has something to do with certain social deviations so prevalent in Kerouac's work -- the use of drugs, the portrayal of premiscuous sex, homosexuality, and so on. If deviation is a sound case for not studying certain texts as literature, then perhaps that is why the argument for body as text is such a precarious literary platform. The human physical body, aside from body art, is full of deviations, and tattooing is yet another deviation. Body art is seen by the social mainstream as highly deviant, a taboo and it's difficult for people to accept deviance in any form. We have to let go of classically accepted literary study to accept the body as text. But, isn't discovering new forms of literature the ultimate goal of literary study? At least, I argue, it is in this post-modern age of critical study. New schools of criticism are continually popping up. My hope is to incorporate the body into literary critical study. Cordell Terrien argues for the universality of the body art phenomena in his essay "Body Adornment"; "Body adornment and decoration is a cultural universal. All cultures everywhere have attempted to change their body in an attempt to fulfill their cultural construct of beauty, religious or social obligations" (1). Isn't conventional text used by most to fill the same constructs? I now ask; 'What is the body?' Is the body -- as Buddhists and Hindus believe -- simply a material vessel which houses the real us? Or is the body, alone, sacred in itself? It is against the Jewish faith to have any body art in which case tattooing bars one from rightfully being buried in a Jewish cemetary. Within many other cultures and religions bodily ornamentation heightens one's social standing. Members of the Maori tribe of New Zealand are more socialy revered if they are heavily tattooed. In India Hindus take a regular pilgrimage in which male members practice sacred body scarification rituals, called Kavadi, in order to pay religious homage. In many non-western cultures body art (scarification, tattooing, and piercing) is seen as an important, sometimes sacred, statement. Non-western people, because of the importance of body art, more readily regard the body as text. The correlation between body art and religion is important. Religiosity is the main reason that the modified body may be seen as text. Buddhist monks are tattooed for protection, members of the Masai African tribe are scarred with animal shapes to bring themselves closer to the animal world, and the Maori also have tattoos to ward off evil spirits -- to name a few examles of the correlation. The religiosity of body art gives rise to bodily textuality in that religious symbols upon the body are meant to be read. Ancient body art practices have paved the way for the 'modern primitive', thus allowing one to view the modern body as text. I quote from Anthony Synnot's The Body Social to further the previous argument; The body has been regarded as a tomb of the soul, a temple, a machine, and the self, and much more; and it has also been treated accordingly. Bodies may be caressed or indeed killed, they may be loved or hated, and thought beautiful or ugly, sacred or profane. Ideas about what the body is, what it means, its moral value and the values of its constituent parts, the limits of the body, its social utility and symbolic value, in sum, how the body is defined both physically and socially, vary widely from person to person, and have changed dramatically over time. The one word, body, may therefore signify very different realities and perceptions of reality (7). With the popularization of tattooing in today's culture the 'modern primitive', I argue, has become a new form of literature. The modern primitive as literature, or seeing the body as text, seems a radical idea. One is used to the notion of conventional literature as being words contained on a page by the likes of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Elizabeth Grosz in her essay "Iscriptions and Body Maps: Representations and the Corporeal", offers a sound argument for viewing the modern human body as text; The body has figured in many recent texts as a writing surface on which messages can be inscribed. The metaphorics of body-writing poses the body, [etc.] as corporeal surfaces on which engraving inscription or 'graffiti' are etched. The metaphor of the textualized body affirms the body as a page or material surface on which messages may be inscribed (236). With the help of Grosz's argument I hope to break the conventional notions of what literature is or should be. Richard Hargrove, in his dissertion abstract, argues for the shift from classical literature studies to a more modern or post-modern approach to literary theory; "Traditional explanations for the movement of artifacts between cultures have relied on theory drawn from the diffusion of innovations literature" (DAI). Grosz's argument is ultimately built upon a more feminist foundation, but I think her argument for the social importance of body inscription can (and does) cross gender lines. A woman's body -- apart from tattoos -- is left to be read by society. This idea of reading the body, however, goes beyond the female body for me. Society reads my body, aside from my own body art, because of my disability. Society is very dependant on physical appearance, and body art takes this dependance to a whole new level. Through body art the body becomes a text which society can read; this reading, in general, is sexually non-spacific. The subject [body] is named by being tagged or branded on its surface, creating a particular kind of 'depth-body' or interiority, a psychic layer the subject identifies as its (disembodied) core. Subjects thus produced are not simply the imposed results of alien, coercive forces; the body is internally lived, experienced and acted by the subject and social collectivity. Messages encoded upon the body can be 'read' only within a social system of organisation and meaning. They mark the subject by, and as, a series of signs within the collectivity of other signs, signs which bear the marks of a particular social law or organisation... (Grosz 238). Various authors throughout modern literature have used tattooing as a thematic basis for some of their writing. Ray Bradbury, in The Illustrated Man, developed a tattooed central character whose tattoos tell each story in the novel. The illustrations contained within each tattoo move about the character's skin to visually tell each short story contained within the novel. "So people fire me when my pictures move. They don't like it when violent things happen in my Illustrations. Each Illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale" (Bradbury 3). In Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony tattoos are used to inscribe a prisoner's misdeeds upon his flesh. The prisoner's flesh is left for everyone to read -- his physical body becomes an open book. " 'This man for example' -- the officer indicated the man -- 'will have inscribed on his body: 'Honor thy superiors!' " (Kafka 130). To further my argument, I intend to look at two pieces of conventional literature, Bradbury's The Illustrated Man and Kafka's In the Penal Colony, which use tattoos as a thematic basis for each story. Within both Kafka's and Bradbury's texts tattooing is used, much like conventional text, to convey meaning on one level or another. The modern primitive, clad in his or her tattoo finery tells a story with each tattooed illustration. With the growing influence of and interest in post-modern theory the idea of what, exactly, constitutes conventional literature has become obscured. For hundreds of years conventional literature was contained on the printed page. As we enter the twenty-first century, however, the idea of the body as text becomes much more plausable. Grosz looks at Niezsche to further her argument that body inscription is sometimes used to display guilt or suspicion, as in In the Penal Colony, upon the individual. "For Nietzsche, civilisation instills its basic requirements by branding or tattooing the law on bodies through a mnemonics of pain" (239). Franz Kafka uses this "mnemonics of pain" as a thematic basis for his short story, "In the Penal Colony." Within the story the prisoners are forcibly tattooed with there misdeeds. A machine is used to inscribe the misdeed upon the prisoner's naked torso. The pain from the forced inscription is excruciating; the prisoner is put to death immediately following the inscription. Civilians are invited to watch the inscription, and read the prisoners guilt upon his body. The prisoner's body transforms into a definate text for everyone to read. The condemned man is laid here on the bed -- you see, first I want to explain the apparatus and then start it up, that way you'll be able to follow it better... -- well, so here is the bed, as I said before. It's completely covered with a layer of cotton wool, you'll find out what that's for later. The condemned man is laid facedown on the cotton wool, naked of course; here are straps for the hands, the feet, and here for the neck, in order to hold him down. So, as I was saying, here at the head of the bed, where the condemned man is at first laid facedown, is the little felt gag that can be adjusted easily to fit straight into the man's mouth (Kafka 128).
submitted by: Anonymous
on: 15 May 1999